212 HISTORY, GOVERNMENT, ETC., 



among its members many of the most abandoned wretches, and 1 am 

 also aware that the Governor and Council are making every exertion 

 to put a stop to the immorality and vice which so generally prevail ; 

 yet I am satisfied that the convicts who are assigned are, in some 

 cases, goaded on to crime by the treatment they receive from their 

 masters, who hold them as slaves, and degrade them to the level of the 

 beast with whom they are forced to labour. 



Although Great Britain has a right to assume a proud pre-eminence 

 in her exertions to emancipate the blacks, yet it behooves her to look 

 to her penal settlements, and examine into the tyranny and degradation 

 that a large number of her subjects are suffering there, many of them 

 for slight crimes. 



Few except those who have visited this colony can be aware of the 

 extent to which the lash is administered, and oftentimes on the mere 

 pretence of unruly and bad behaviour to their masters, or for the most 

 trivial offences. So many facts of this sort were stated to me by 

 persons in office, and of the highest respectability, that there cannot be 

 a doubt of their correctness. The following extract from a report of 

 the Committee of Transportation in 1835 will show it in its true light. 



" In 1835, the number of convicts in the colony of New South 

 Wales was above twenty-eight thousand, and the summary convic- 

 tions in that year were estimated at twenty-two thousand. In one 

 month in 1833, two hundred and forty-seven convicts were flogged, and 

 nine thousand seven hundred and eighty-four lashes inflicted, which 

 would make for the whole year two thousand nine hundred and sixty- 

 four floggings, and about one hundred and eight thousand lashes. 

 This amount does not embrace one-third of the convicts convicted 

 summarily, but only those sentenced to be flogged, and there yet 

 remain those to be added who were sentenced to other degrees of 

 punishment : male convicts to the iron-gangs and treadmill, and females 

 to the solitary cells of the factory." 



The inquiries that I made in relation to the native-born inhabitants, 

 were universally answered by all in favour both of their morals and 

 habits. Judge Burton bears testimony that the free immigrants and 

 native colonists are as exempt from the commission of crime as the 

 inhabitants of any other country. 



The defect in the female assignments is equally obvious. They are 

 assigned only to married settlers who are considered respectable. They 

 are accompanied by their children from the mother country, but imme- 

 diately upon arriving the assignment takes place, and as the party to 

 whom the convict is assigned does not wish to be encumbered with her 

 offspring, they are at once separated. The child is not unfrequently 



